The South Korean manufacturer Mtron, a relatively new company, announced three new solid state drive products featuring MSD, MSD PRO and MSD XTM, that are fully optimized for consumer purposes, server applications and industrial purposes. The product lines feature 2.5/3.5 inch SATA SSD drives with capacities of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. Mtron will also introduce 1.8 inch form factor and 128GB capacity in the 4th quarter of the year in order to provide more efficient battery life and higher stability for notebook computers.

The company claims its drives can reach a read speed of 120MB/s and write speed of 90MB/s, along with 0.1 ms random access time. This means they are three to four times faster than existing magnetic hard drives and 30 to 40 percent faster than other SSD drives produced by companies like Samsung and San Disk.

The 16GB, 32GB and 64GB SSD drives will be available in later this month, but no pricing is available yet.

TEMPO is a concept design for an unique external hard drive storage device in the form of a miniature recycle bin. It is intended to protect the user from accidentally deleting files or as an external storage device. As you delete files, they are automatically moved to the TEMPO device, so that if you incidentally delete a needed file you can recover it. And as the device fills up, leds light the “can” from the bottom up, visually informing you of how much free space is available.

As for the technical details, they are still quite sketchy. It seems that the hard drive will be 250GB in size and Bluetooth interface will be used for transferring files. The device should be compatible with both Windows and Mac computers. Maybe the only drawback in the idea will be the Bluetooth that is quite slow when transferring large amounts of data, especially when we are talking about multimedia files with sizes of hundred megabytes or even gigabytes. A 802.11g (up to 54 Mbps) or even 802.11n (up to 300Mbps) Wi-Fi connection will be much better especially considering the fact that both the PC and the Tempo should be very close in terms of distance between the two. Even a non-wireless 100Mbps or even 1 Gigabit ethernet version might be a good idea considering the need to transfer large amounts of data between the PC and the Tempo device.

Tempo is just a concept that hasn’t been technologically designed, but the idea behind it still remains quite interesting.

The world’s hottest video game star is back in Tomb Raider: Legend and NECA has a highly detailed, articulated figure of the Legend herself: Lara Croft. Lara is loaded with accessories and detail. Now she can even speak actual phrases as heard in the popular video game.